The history of stoplists: lists of words not indexed

Abstract

The concept of the stoplist – a list of the words not indexed – is related to indexable matter, to the arrangement of subentries in indexes, and to search engine optimization. Stoplists were thought to have been developed in the 1950s in conjunction with automatic indexing, but a fifteenth-century Hebrew concordance to the Bible, Me’ir Nativ , contains a stoplist that is very similar to modern ones, consisting of function words such as prepositions. Since the Hebrew concordance was modeled on the Latin biblical concordance of Arlottus, which does not contain a stoplist, Me’ir Nativ must be regarded as the first example of this structure. Although stopwords were omitted from the earliest Latin concordances (without listing them), subsequent theological debate about the meanings of Latin function words led to the compilation of special concordances of such words. Current research by the author focuses on the importance of similar small words to the Masoretes, who were concerned about preserving an accurate text of the Hebrew Bible, and may possibly have had an index of such words.